Abstract
Despite Edward Said’s extensive analysis of the manifestations of Orientalism in European culture, music receives little of his attention. Yet he had a strong interest in the art form and frequently used musical imagery in his critical language.1 His formal treatment of empire and opera, for instance, was confined to a discussion of the genesis—and not the music or narrative—of Verdi’s Aida in Culture and Imperialism.2 Like him, many have written about nineteenth-century Paris as the hub of Orientalist study and even more specifically about the French Romantic taste for the exotic and the Orientalist in literature (Nerval’s Voyage en Orient or Hugo’s Les Orientales) and in the visual arts (the paintings of Delacroix or Ingres). Ralph Locke and Susan McClary, among others, have discussed the nature and politics of the exotic in French music in general.3 Many have made the obvious generalizations about the link between colonialism and Orientalism, but few have tied the overt operatic explorations of imperialism directly and concretely to the historical fact that France was an active colonial power in North Africa and the Islamic Middle East in the middle and late nineteenth century.4
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Notes
See Pegram Harrison, “Music and Imperialism,” Repercussions 4.1 (1995): 53–84.
Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993), 111–32.
See Ralph P. Locke, “Exoticism and Orientalism in Music: Problems for the Worldly Critic,” Edward Said and the Work of the Critic: Speaking Truth to Power , ed. Paul Bové (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000), 257–81; Susan McClary, Feminine Endings: Music, Gender and Sexuality (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991); Danièle Pistone, “Les conditions historiques de l’exotisme musical français,” Revue internationale de musigue franfaise 6 (1981): 14–15 especially, on Romanticism and its relation to musical exoticism in general.
Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1978), 3.
Ali Behdad, “Orientalist Desire, Desire of the Orient,” French Forum 15 (1990): 39.
Ralph P. Locke, “Constructing the Oriental ‘Other’: Saint-Saens’s Samson et Dalila ,” Cambridge Opera Journal 3.3 (1991): 263.
See János Karpati, “Non-European Influences on Occidental Music (A Historical Survey),” The World ofMusic 22.2 (1980): 25.
James Parakilas, “How Spain Got a Soul,” in The Exotic in Western Music , ed. Jonathan Bellman (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998), 137–93.
See Anthony Pagden, Peoples and Empires (New York: Modern Library, 2001), 63–65.
For a general look at operas about India, see Robert J. Del Bonta, “Song of India,” Opera Quarterly 2.1 (1984): 5–14; Mehta, Widows , 53–54. On the French lack of knowledge of and interest in Indian music, see Jann Pasler, “India and its Music in the French Imagination before 1913,” Journal of the Indian Musicological Society 27 (1996): 27–51. On Heidi Holder’s work on the representation of India on the British stage in the same period (especially in melodramas, operas, and spectacles), see MacKenzie, Orientialism , 186–96.
For more details on techniques and modes of musical Orientalism, see Locke, “Exoticism,” 276; Carl Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music , trans. J. Bradford Robinson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 306; McClary, Feminine Endings , 53; MacKenzie, Orientalism , 141–46; Ramón Pelinski, “Orientalische Kolorit in der Musik des 19. Jahrhunderts,” Weltkulturen und moderne Kunst (Munich: Bruckmann, 1972), 153.
Hugh Macdonald, “Lakmé ,” in The New Grove Dictionary of Opera , ed. Stanley Sadie (London: Macmillan, 1992), 2:1083.
See Steven Huebner, “L’Africaine ,” in Sadie, New Grove , 1:31–33; John Roberts, “The Genesis of Meyerbeer’s L’Africaine ,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, 1977; Robert I. Letellier, “History, Myth and Music on a Theme of Exploration: Some Reflections on the Musico-Dramatic Language of L’Africaine ,” in Dohring and Jacobshagen, Meyerbeer , 188–89; Heinz Becker, Meyerbeer (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1980), 122–30; Reiner Zimmermann, Giacomo Meyerbeer: Eine Biographie nach Dokumenten (Berlin: Parthas, 1998), 312–19; Christhard Frese, Dramaturgie dergrossen Opern Giacomo Meyerbeers (Berlin: Robert Lienau, 1970), 218–67.
Another possible influence on the change to a Portuguese setting is the German success in 1823 of Louis Spohr’s opera Jessonda , based on a French eighteenth-century play, La veuve de Malabar , by A. M. Lemierre. Set in Goa in the early sixteenth century, the opera is about the encounter of Brahmins and the Portuguese army under General Tristan d’Acunha—and about the love of the general and Jessonda, the widow of the rajah. Gier argues that a black heroine would not have been an ideal of beauty for Meyerbeer’s audience and that this is why he changed her to an Indian/Aryan (“L’Africaine ,” 137). For theories about the impact of other books Meyerbeer was reading at the time, see Zimmermann, Giacomo Meyerbeer , 313.
Balachandra Rajan, Under Western Eyes: India from Milton to Macaulay (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999), 35–36.
Raoul Girardet, L’idee coloniale en France de 1871 a 1962 (Paris: La Table Ronde, 1972), 91.
Frederick Quinn, The French Oversees Empire (Westport and London: Praeger, 2000), 109; Pagden, Peoples , 136–37.
Henri Froidevaux, “Du XVIe siecle a 1720,” in Histoire des colonies franfaises et de l’expansion de la France dans le monde , Vol. 5, L’Inde , ed. Gabriel Hanotaux and Alfred Martineau (Paris: Société de l’histoire nationale; Librairie Plon, 1932), 8.
Henri Brunschwig, French Colonialism 1871–1914: Myths and Realities , trans. William Glanville Brown (London: Pall Mall Press, 1964), 18.
See Alan Bewell, Romanticism and ColonialDisease (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 242–76.
For an example, see Martin Cooper’s review of the 1979 Covent Garden revival, “‘L’Africaine’ Revived and Re-Assessed,” Opera 30 (1979): 14–17. The change in ideology may also explain why DanielFrancois-Esprit Auber’s big success of 1868, Le premier jour de bonheur is no longer part of the repertoire. The story takes place during the British siege of the French holding called Pondicherry, in India. However, somehow, despite the obvious obstacles, a French officer and the daughter of the British governor of Madras end up living happily ever after. Indian colonial politics enter the story in the form of the temple priestesses who are imprisoned in the temple by French troops and released by the officer.
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Hutcheon, L., Hutcheon, M. (2004). Displacement and Anxiety: Empire and Opera. In: Rajan, B., Sauer, E. (eds) Imperialisms. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403980465_13
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